The present invention relates to touch screen interfaces, and more particularly to a method of zooming in/out for a graphics display.
A quick and intuitive method for zooming in on a user-defined section of a graphics display is to simply indicate a rectangle with a mouse or touch on a graphics display screen by dragging one corner to an opposite corner. The area within the rectangle is then expanded in two dimensions to fill the entire display upon a user action, such as lifting the mouse cursor or touch, clicking a zoom button or clicking within the rectangle. The issue of how to perform the opposite actionxe2x80x94zooming outxe2x80x94has not been well addressed to date. Another weakness of the present method is that a one-dimension-only zoom is somewhat awkward in that the operator has to think carefully about the problem, then draw the rectangle to completely span the axis that he doesn""t want to affect.
What is desired is a quick and intuitive method for zooming out as well as zooming in including an easy way for performing one-dimension-only zooming.
Accordingly the present invention provides a method of zooming either in or out by drawing a rectangle on a graphics display, using either touch or a mouse. A pair of icons are presented, one within the rectangle and the other outside the rectangle. Clicking or touching within the rectangle results in zooming in so that what is inside the rectangle fills the entire display, and clicking or touching outside the rectangle results in zooming out so that the entire display is compressed to within the rectangle with additional previously unseen portions of the image fill the remainder of the screen. For one-dimensional-only zooming the rectangle is drawn along an axis in a peripheral area of the display, and the rectangle completely encompasses the other axis.